Re:Joyce Episode 270 - The Mysterious Man in the Macintosh

Comments

I just love the thoughts on the man in the macintosh this week. If that is the most talked about mystery in Ulysses then perhaps a good second to that would be the significance of U.p.; up coming up later in the book. I am going along on my third read of Ulysses. Each reading has been of a different text. The first was of the 1961 Re-Set type with Woolsey court decision as preface. The second was the original 1922 text now widely available and cheap in the States due to copyright going out. This time I'm checking out the Gabler edition you've recommended. It is as much of a pleasure to read now as it has always been.

Macintosh. Lanky galoot. no question it's Joyce playing Joyce. spoiler alert here. In Ithaca much later on bloom reads Joe Haynes' account of funeral where bloom becomes boom and the man in the Macintosh becomes Macintosh and then in 18 right in the middle of Molly's menstrual flow she begs Jamesy to let her off from her suffering. these three bits unite so much of Ulysses together. So it's bloom & Joyce in the grave yard and Molly and Joyce at the chamber pot. The three together now and forever. No matter what. Perfect Joyce. Sorry Frank just couldn't resist

I just goggled "tosh" as in MacinTOSH. The word balloons with pertinent meaning from sewer slush to bed pan and more much more. So it's "Mac"=little "in"=inside "tosh"= sewer, graveyard, chamber pot. Anyone who thinks Einstein was the quintessential genius of the 20th century is ignorant of Joyce, the rival of both Homer & Shakespeare, and their best critic.

I think it was Nabokov (always worth reading when it comes to literature,) who solved the Macintosh puzzle: Macintosh is Joyce at the funeral - refer to Scylla and Charybdis episode wherein Stephen refers to Shakespeare hidden in his works: 'as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvass.' That what's Joyce did..(perhaps). TB

Yes, of all the theories surrounding the identity of the mysterious man in the Macintosh, Nabokov's deduction is ultimately compelling. Joyce leaves enough textual evidence, in Ullyses and elsewhere, to support this conclusion, and the further suggestion that in creating both Stephen and Bloom as his younger and older literary incarnations he succeeds in realising his Aquinine literary Holy Trinity.